


Allodynia

by The_Lady_Meg



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Gen, Pain, lots of pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 06:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5995579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lady_Meg/pseuds/The_Lady_Meg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Allodynia - Painful response to touch”</p>
<p>For a prompt on the ohsam “You only hurt the one you love” meme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Allodynia

He doesn’t notice with the scar. Not at first. No-one touches it anyway, Dean doesn’t like to acknowledge its’ existence, and there’s no-one else who’s tactile enough with him for it to be noticeable.

Dean dies, and Ruby bugs him until he gives in to her, what she wants, what he thinks she’s offering. They’re in bed (a rare thing for them, usually too caught up to make it that far) when she runs her hand down his back and over the scar, and pain – white hot and agonizing – flares over his lower back. He pulls away from her sharply and demands to know what she did. She denies having done anything, a mildly puzzled look on her face, and comments that he must be older than he looks if his back is acting up already. He drops it, and she soothes him the only way she knows how.

He doesn’t think of it again until Dean appears in the doorway to his motel, grinning and joking and _alive_. The hug he’s pulled into is good, great even, until Dean’s hand grazes over the scar and it feels like being stabbed all over again. He flinches and pulls back slightly, ignoring the slightly hurt look on his brother’s face, and is promptly distracted by Ruby and Dean (who’s alive, and unhurt, and _smiling_ , and Sam could almost believe in angels again at this moment).

In the back of his mind, he makes a mental note to research what the problem with his back could be, maybe even see a doctor.

He doesn’t.

Too many monsters, too many angels, too many fights with Dean, and he’s too exhausted to care about something that matters so little.

And then he frees Lucifer and ends the world and abandons Dean because he can’t anymore, he just _can’t_. He ends up in a small bar, talking to a normal girl with normal problems, until his problems spill over into her world and someone’s holding him down and waving demon blood in his face. There’s a hand on his back, barely an inch above the scar, and he concentrates too much on not letting them touch it, avoiding the pain, and not enough on avoiding the demon blood being poured down his throat. It burns his mouth (it always did, he remembers, except before he had burning fury and hatred and conviction on his side and it didn’t matter), and his face as he spits it back out. Lindsay’s ok, shaken and scared but ok, and he goes to bed that night with a phantom pain in his back and a burn in his throat, but feeling like he might be able to be a decent person again. Not a good one, the Apocalypse isn’t really something you get a do-over on, but maybe he could try and atone in smaller ways.

That feeling doesn’t last the night.

The overwhelming horror of being Lucifer’s vessel eclipses the pain he fell asleep to, and there are more problems waiting for him when he and Dean start hunting together again, and the problem with his scar slips his mind for a while.

He only really remembers afterwards. After the Cage, and Lucifer. He’s hunting with the Campbells when it happens, someone claps him on the back after he takes out a werewolf, and a flare of pain sends him to his knees, fogging up his mind in a way he remembers from before, only now it feels like frostbite instead of fire.

Samuel didn’t even touch the scar. He just clapped him on the shoulder. This shouldn’t have happened. That’s all he can think when his mind clears enough to let him, that it doesn’t make sense.

He pulls back from touching anybody for a while, and the Campbells let him. He’s not that important to them, and they don’t care. He builds up a tolerance to the pain by picking up random women, learning how to breathe and talk and fuck through it, until he can disconnect his physical responses from the agony that flares under his skin every time someone touches him almost entirely.

_Almost_ entirely.

He rescues Dean from the djinn without thinking about it, despite it compromising Samuel’s plan, and waits patiently for his brother to wake up.

When Dean hugs him, he breathes through it and smiles and concentrates on not screaming.

It’s not really an issue after that. Dean touches him less and less, cares about him less and less, and it hurts in a different way, but Sam prefers that to the way his muscles lock up and scream in agony every time someone brushes past him in the street.

After Death puts his soul back in, he doesn’t remember to worry about it. Dean hugs him and it doesn’t hurt (and why does he think that it should?), and no-one touches his scar and he’s fine.

When the Wall comes crashing down, he remembers all the reasons he’s not fine. Lucifer smiles at him from the corner of the room and Dean hugs him more and he forgets to suppress his reaction entirely, but Dean’s too relieved he’s upright to notice.

His entire body hurts all the time now, more when someone touches him, but not just then. His back most of all, white-hot pulses of pain lancing up and down, always concentrated around the scar, interspersed with the pins and needles sensation of frostbite. He wants to scream that it’s unfair, that it’s only his brain that was supposed to be fucked up by the Wall coming down, not his body as well. He doesn’t. He just breathes through it and prays for everything to stop hurting.

It’s Lucifer who tells him (of course it is) (but Lucifer’s just a hallucination, so does that mean that Sam already knew?) why it got so much worse after the Cage. Why it’s so much worse with his soul back in. Turns out there’s only so many times you can inflict the same injury (“ _and I did, Sam, I broke your spine into pieces so many times and knit it back together just to hear you scream all over again_ ”) before your mind starts thinking it’s still there. Starts reacting like it’s still there. The scar was the beginning, his body reacting to the injury that killed him, but there have been so many since then, and his body feels them all.

Lucifer laughs at him as he curls up in the bed next to Dean’s and bites his hand bloody so he doesn’t scream.


End file.
